Thursday, March 16, 2006

We had a great time at Holi. Our hotel is in a sedate kind of town, near embassies and places like Unicef, and institutions like that don't seem to go in much for flinging color around, at least in public. Walking up the street, we were followed for a while by some little kids who were red, green, and blue, but they weren't quite brave enough to catch up with us (maybe I should say that at that point we were too scared to let them catch up with us).

Finally we boarded a autorickshaw and went up to Old Delhi, which is a lot more packed with people and storefronts. All the stores were closed, but there were lots of people running around. Mostly teenage boys. Very few women, since they tend to get harassed on this holiday. We were prime targets, as the picture above shows. The holiday began to run down around 2pm, and stores started opening up again around then.

Even a dog or two got color:

And we also finally saw some elephants. They were carrying brush and seemed to be working rather than appearing as part of Holi. They had some nice designs, but no color.